​The Law of Retaliation, technically the Lex Talionis, Latin for the “Law of the Claw,” originated in ancient Babylon during the reign of King Hammurabi (1792-1750 BCE). Wikipedia describes Hammurabi’s Code as containing “282 laws . . . inscribed on a large stone stele and placed in a public place so that all could see them.” Most famous today from the Code is the phrase “an eye for an eye,” which limited revenge to so-called retributive, or balanced, justice. This concept appears as a commandment in Exodus 21:23-23, where Hammurabi’s phrase is used. Now scholars believe that this Old Testament book was not written until the 6th century BCE, some 1200 years later. However, if we look at Exodus 22, just one chapter later, we find verses like these: “When someone steals an ox or a sheep, and slaughters it or sells it, the thief shall pay five oxen for an ox, and four sheep for a sheep” (NRSV, v. 1) or, in verse 7, “When someone delivers to a neighbor money or goods for safekeeping, and they are stolen from the neighbor’s house, then the thief, if caught, shall pay double.”

My dear fellow Americans,
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By the time this mid-October blog is published, the United States will have a new or renewed President. So what I write here will have no bearing on the outcome of the November 5th Election. Still, I felt it important to share my thoughts with those of you who’ve voted for President Trump...

​The wonders of Nature are the wonders of Nature. I suppose they are not wonders to themselves. They’re just doing their everyday thing. They can be wonders to us if, as Jesus likes to say, we have the eyes to see and the ears to hear. From time to time in the past, I have had my momentary oohs and aahs. But now, as I quickly approach my 85th birthday and my prospects of seeing those wonders for an open-ended time have become more consciously limited, I am paying more attention to what’s out there. And perhaps even more incredible than those things of natural beauty and competence themselves is my recurring question: How do they know how to do the breathtaking things they do?

​Those of you who have been with me for a while know that “Reynold’s the name and wisdom’s the game.” Of course, wisdom is available in many forms, from proverbs to haikus to stories, whole books and plays. It is often the product of experience or even examples. As the French proverb suggests, “Children need examples, not sermons.” But sermons can also be the source of significant wisdom. In a past blog I shared some of my favorite proverbs from Cynthia Voelke’s and my 1992 book, A World Treasury of Folk Wisdom. In this volume we collected 1,000 proverbs from more than a hundred countries. These maxims were divided into 100 categories of ten selections each. Not more than one proverb from a single nation or culture was permitted per category. Today I am sharing personal favorites from a collection not of proverbs but quotations found in Shelley Tucker’s Openings—Quotations on Spirituality in Everyday Life (1997). Her book is divided into 41 categories. And in this context I can offer a personal definition of proverbs as quotations that have lost their authors and become common cultural or social property. So, without further ado, here’s my selection. See if you can figure out their categories.

​Now we’ve all heard of Rumi. That is, Jalal al-Din Muhammad, the Mevlana or Master (1207-1273), the Persian-born poet, scholar, and mystic. His Sufi order, or lineage, is known as the Medlevis, or more familiarly, the Whirling Dervishes. There is even a contemporary American offshoot called MOA, the Medlevi Order of America. I should know since a married couple, friends of mine in Hawaii, are leaders of the Order there and, yes, they can both whirl. Rumi, as he is commonly known, has had much of his written wisdom translated into English and no doubt into many other languages. His longest work is a 50,000-line poem, The Masnavi, considered “the Quran in Persian,” which instructs Sufis and others on how to come into the love of God. He got the name Rumi, by the way, from the place where he lived, worked, and died in southwestern Turkey. The city, Konya, was considered in its day the Rome of Turkey, in Turkish “Rum.”  Hence, as someone closely associated with that place, he became known as “Rumi,” literally “Roman.” Among his many famous sayings, one of my favorites is—“Out beyond ideas of wrong-doing and right-doing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there.”

​My Word program redlined me on the last word of this blog’s title. Oh well, I guess I just brought a new word into existence. The concept to be sure is older than the hills. The Jehovah presented in the Hebrew Scriptures is nothing if not transactional. Look at all I’ve done for you, “He” seems to be saying. Not only have I created the whole world and filled it with plants and animals to help and sustain you, but I’ve created you. Now it’s your turn to do whatever I want you to do, and woe be unto you if you fail me. You’ll get it from me in spades... 

​Maybe I’m just a masochist. You see, I spent three years in my Lutheran days participating in the Bethel Bible Series. To gain your diploma you spent two years studying the Old Testament—the less judgmental term is the “Hebrew Scriptures”—followed by a final year studying the New. Then, more recently, as an Episcopalian, I did the four-year Education for Ministry (EfM) Program put together by theologians at the Episcopal Seminary in Sewanee, Tennessee. Here we covered the Old Testament in Year 1, the New in Year 2, history of the Christian religion in Year 3, and theology in Year 4. At the end I received a frameable diploma from the University of the South on behalf of its School of Theology implying that I was now an educated lay minister. (Consider Luther’s statement about “the priesthood of all believers.”) But here’s where the masochism comes in. Our Episcopal parish, St. John’s in Boulder, Colorado, has now offered a program whereby participants read the entire Bible in 365 days. And guess who joined the 79 other parishioners in this so-called Bible Challenge: Me!

​All religions, I suspect, have an inner as well as an outer aspect: an esoteric and an exoteric side. But I was surprised that Islam, such a straightlaced and serious-seeming faith, would have a lighter side, personified in part by a legendary—and possibly a real-life—character known as the Mullah Nasrudin. Associated primarily with Turkey, as was the mystic Rumi, the Mullah is often pictured as riding backwards on his mule (See below.). His reason: So he could see where he was coming from...

​Born in New York City on November 6, 1939, I was the third generation of Jewish Americans in my family. All four of my grandparents had arrived in the United States in the last decade of the 19th century: two from Belarus, one from the Ukraine, and one from Romania. Three of them were Ashkenazim, or German Jews, while the fourth, my paternal grandfather from Romania, was a Sephardi, or Spanish Jew. Both my parents were non-religious. My father had had the strict Orthodox version of the religion beaten into him as a boy. So once a man, he remained an ethnic Jew from Brooklyn but would have nothing to do with the religion. My mother, a farmer’s daughter and the eldest girl among eleven children, came from a non-religious family and stayed that way until her death at 95. Consequently, my encounters with the Jewish faith were mainly through periodic visits to my paternal grandmother, the daughter of a Jewish official and a rigorously faithful Orthodox Jew. When my 13th birthday approached, she apparently had told my father that if “the boy” were not bar-mitzphahed, she would curse Dad from her deathbed. I was totally unprepared. So, my father bribed Grandma’s rabbi, who in effect did my part in the ritual. Oy!

​My wife and I watch so little TV that we might be liable to be exiled by a future national government as un-American. Of course, we hope that such a government will be soundly thumped in the upcoming 2024 presidential election. A landslide of that kind would do the heart and soul as well as the country good. So, getting to our viewing habits: First, most of it takes place on Rocky Mountain PBS. To be sure, even public television has in recent years supplemented its periodic fundraising drives with actual commercials. And viewing ads on commercial television is a major turnoff for us. Thanks to the legacy of the individual the Sesame Street characters referred to as Alistair Cookie Monster, we generally limit ourselves to shows on Masterpiece. Besides that, I’ve been watching the PBS News Hour from what seems like its very beginning, going back to MacNeil- Lehrer. Nowadays I generally limit myself to the 20-minute news summary, to leave psychological room for 50 minutes of Grantchester or All Creatures Great and Small...

​To date I have written and had published five books on practical wisdom. My favorite, which at number three falls exactly in the middle, is Wising Up—A Youth Guide to Good Living. Co-authored with M. Jan Rumi, it was published in 2007 by Cowley Publications, an imprint of Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. It is a collection of 80 one-page essays, each with an opening quotation, a good-living principle, and three optional journal or school exercises. Sample essay titles include Go for It!, Wait a Minute!, Stay the Course, Never Say Never, Don’t Boss Others Around, Choose Friends Wisely, Laugh, and Dance. Our final words to our readers are “Best wishes as you take your place in the world. By applying the principles in this book, you should be able to live a truly good life: one that fulfills your dreams while enriching those around you, including Mother Earth.” I am especially proud of the fact that my co-author and I represent all three Abrahamic faiths: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, as well as two diverse nations, the United States and Bangladesh...

Big-question time! So why are were here, living on Planet Earth? What’s it all about, Alfie? Beware of anyone who claims they really know. Any answer in the end is pure speculation. Still, it’s fun to speculate. So read along with me. Let’s see what we may see.
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As an educator, I’ve often thought of the Planet as a kind of school where we’re supposed to learn to become our biggest and best selves while helping the human race in whatever small ways to evolve into a peaceful, harmonious, mutually helpful family. It’s a John Deweyan form of education, where we learn by doing. Any mistake so long as it’s not fatal to ourselves or others can help us along the path. In this regard, I think the Hindu-Buddhist concept of reincarnation makes sense, since not many of us are likely to become fully noble human beings during one lifetime, unless, that is, we have filed down many rough spots in previous lives. In education this sort of “keep at it till you’ve got it” approach is known as mastery learning. It’s in line with the saying that if at first you don’t succeed, try, try again...

If you want to score with a bestseller, write about your near-death experiences (NDE’s). Of course, you have to have some first and be a halfway decent writer. Along with UFO encounters, NDEs command near-universal interest and attention. After all, to quote Shakespeare, death is that “undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveller returns” (Hamlet, III, I, 90-91) All travelogues will be highly esteemed...

This blog is a companion piece to the one titled “From Me-dom to WE-dom.” In fact, it discusses one of the major ways we can live in a “WE” versus a “me” mindset. So fasten your seatbelts for a minute or two, and here we go.

The term significant other,” or S.O. for short, is usually reserved for one’s partner or sweetie. Of course, for better or worse, the people who raise us and the list of other important people in our lives, from special teachers, coaches, ministers, relatives besides our parents, to close friends may also merit the term. My point here, however, is that we should consider everyone we encounter as at least potential S.O.s and relate to them accordingly. What’s the line? Many a time we have been visited by angels unaware. The story of how Abraham and Sarah showed hospitality to the three men who turned out in fact to be angels (Genesis 18:1-15) is illustrative here. A modern equivalent for us might be, treat your seatmate on an airplane with courtesy and respect, for you don’t know who he or she may turn out to be...

​The other title I thought of, given my hours of watching the now-concluded Paris Olympics, was “WE, WE, Monsieur!” In either case, in light of the Olympics’ modeling of friendly competition amongst sometimes hostile nations, a critical mass of humankind now needs to embrace a broader, more inclusive view of our global world. From my perspective, the most important race to be won is the human one. That’s why, in this age of self-definition through the use of personal pronouns, I have been giving mine as He-Him-WE, with the capitalization of “we” hinting at where I am going with this thought...

​It interests me that the word for vacation in a number of languages is plural. Take Portuguese, where it’s férias. The term is plural in the other Romance languages as well. Even Germany has a related plural term, die Ferien, although the other Romance languages have words that are cognates with our “vacation.” Take les vacances in French, le vacanze in Italian, and las vacaciones in Spanish. Do people who speak those languages simply take more vacations? The Malay language spoken in Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore (among other tongues), and parts of southern Thailand doesn’t always distinguish between singular and plural. Often you need to modify the noun in question with a number. Helpfully for us English speakers, the Malay term is vakansi...

​My wife and I live in Boulder, Colorado. The next town due south is called Superior. At least one thing justifies that name: It is the site of our nearest Costco. Result: We head there every month to stock up, mainly on stuff we need. Today as we drove home from our provisioning trip, we took a back road along the route of the Superior wildfire of several years ago, a year-end conflagration which burned down over 1,000 houses and other structures. We passed a modest unburned house. Its front lawn was adorned with smallish American flags, the kind kids would wave at holiday parades. Next to the driveway a TRUMP 2024 sign was proudly displayed. I thought about the people who lived there right next to our true-Blue community and in a solidly Democrat state with a married gay Jewish governor. Here’s what I might say to those folks...

​If you’d mentioned the term oxymoron to me back in 5th grade, I would have thought it a fancy way of saying “dumb ox,” a term of insult in frequent use back then by my fellow classmates and me. In the mid-60s, when I’d begun my college-teaching career, however, I would teach the term’s correct meaning to my English students with the then-popular anti-war example, “military intelligence.” Now, in 2024, the title of this blog can do that duty, illustrating as it does both choice and collaborative acceptance. Perhaps the most famous example of either/or is the beginning of Hamlet’s soliloquy “To Be or Not to Be.” I mean, the Prince of Denmark is contemplating suicide, to live or not to live. One can only be in one state or the other. The two are mutually exclusive. Yet even here there is a both/and possibility. For example, individuals suffering from Alzheimer’s Disease are still physically alive and identifiable with the persons named in their passports or driver’s licenses. Yet the human beings they once were in personality and mental acuity are lost and gone forever. They are no longer the they everyone knew...

​So here’s the deal. Number 1, you’re too old. Number 2, you’re too old. And number 3 . . . Wait! I forget what Number 3 is. Joe, I hate to share it with you, especially as one of your long-time, die-heart supporters, but last night, June 27th, you proved to America and the world that you just don’t have it anymore. We were hoping for the fire of your State of the Union speech, but that’s not what we got. Your good days are now behind you. Time to go to Rehoboth Beach, kick back, and reflect on all your victories in a long and storied carrier as an elected official and public servant on the national stage. If you insist on going forward, Trump will have you for breakfast just as he had you for dinner last night. Despite all the rah-rah online support the official Democrat machine is offering about how you really gave it to the Donald, the reality is you did give it to him—the November election, that is. True, you did get a little better as the night wore on, still hoarse but your points were somewhat more understandable if not exactly harpoons to the heart of your opponent. For his part Trump offered his well-rehearsed Maga lines, two-thirds lies and one-third exaggerations. But—and here’s the point—in terms of energy and control, he seemed not four years younger but twenty-four: the oldest son arguing with a doddering grandpa of a father. It doesn’t matter if what he said was a jumble of ad-hominem barbs. Truth be told, you got in your share too, although given the low energy level of your voice, they sounded almost like compliments. It seemed a contest for who was the worst American President ever!

​My now-wife, Cedar Barstow, and I had been together a mere half year when we decided to use our federal Silver Sneakers benefit as elders to join the local YMCA for free. Apparently, some money-wise experts had found that seniors who exercise regularly were less likely to cost the Government money and therefore successfully advised Medicare to invest in free access to some 40,000 health clubs around the country for its members. Not only that, but we decided to attend a thrice-weekly hour-long program called Water Fitness. During the last 14 ½ years, its leadership has changed, but the exercises were always worthwhile and have really kept us both, now nearly 85 and 80, in good mental and physical health.

For at least a half dozen years, maybe more, my wife, Cedar, and I have been spending one or two days each year with seven to ten others at a mountain retreat located a forty-minute drive northwest from our house. For those of you who don’t know, we live in Boulder, Colorado, a smallish city that’s home to the main campus of the University of Colorado. Boulder has several other claims to fame, not least that it lies in a valley on the eastern doorstep of the Rocky Mountains. It’s a wonderful place to live. But this blog isn’t about the wonders of Boulder; instead, it concerns finding wonder 1,000 feet higher than our mile-high location at what the husband-and-wife owners, nature educators, call the Wild Heart Center for Nature & Psyche. So, on May 25, 2024, we left home at 9 a.m. to take part in an all-day program called “Rewilding Heart: Communing with the Living World.”

​Many of you reading this blog will know that about 30 years ago my wife, Dr. Cedar Barstow, started doing ethics training with individuals and groups. Her friend Amina mentioned to her back then that ethics is really just the right use of power. A light bulb went on for Cedar, so she started referring to her ethics training programs as teaching “the right use of power.” I came into Cedar’s life 15 years ago, and based on my work in the nonprofit community, I persuaded her to incorporate her program, and in 2013 it became a 501(c)3 federally tax-exempt organization. Now The Right Use of Power Institute, or RUPI, it is headed by the 44-year-old Dr. Amanda Aguilera who has diversified it into an international effort with some 500-plus teachers trained to help individuals and groups use their power with greater wisdom and skill, or, in Cedar’s terms, “to stand in their power while staying in their hearts.” Programs are currently available in Spanish as well as English. You can learn more about RUPI’s work at www.rightuseofpower.org. There are also two books on the subject: C. Barstow’s Right Use of Power: The Heart of Ethics (2nd ed., 2015) and Barstow and Feldman, Living in the Power Zone: How Right Use of Power Can Transform Your Relationships (2013). Both are available from Amazon or at the RUPI website. Initially and in both books, four kinds of power are discussed: personal, role, collective, and status. In the last few years two additional types have been added: systemic and universal power. This week’s blog will deal with Collective Power...

​I have four virtual hiking poles for this pilgrimage: People, places, religions, and languages. Let’s begin with people—those heaven-sent witnesses who showed me that the Other was not to be feared but to be learned from and embraced as fellow members of the human family. The first was Florine, our African-American housekeeper who came when I was 1 ½ and stayed till I graduated from high school. She was black, working-class, religious, and Christian. We were white, middle-class, secular, and Jewish. Even as a toddler, however, I understood that, different as she was, she was the strongest, most loving person in the house. The next was Al Watson, my boarding-school English teacher. Al was my equivalent of the charismatic teacher played by Robin Williams in the film “The Dead Poets’ Society.”..

Almost exactly a year ago I wrote a blog about following the yellow directional arrows (flechas amarillas in Spanish) that help one stay on the Camino de Santiago, the pilgrimage way that leads to the Cathedral of Saint James (“Santiago” in Spanish) in Santiago de Compostela, a regional capital in northwestern Spain. Today, however, the pilgrimage I refer to is less religious and more the stuff of popular culture, as you’ll see in a moment...

​In English this French expression generally refers to an individual who knows her or mainly his way around town, that is, someone who is a suave or debonaire type (three other French terms). The literal meaning of the phrase is simply “to know [what] to do.” A related English saying is “Knowledge is power.” Let’s consider a few examples that illustrate both these expressions...